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Comment by jen729w | Hacker News Reader

> Europe is a graveyard of failed national champions … Airbus is the rare success story.

Oh, come now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_E...

They mentioned Concorde in that list of failures. But while it was a financial failure in of itself, it was probably the precursor to Airbus - a strong collaboration between the UK and France to save their failing airliner businesses. I doubt it was an overall failure.

It is like saying that the tunnel that links the France and Great Britain was a failure

And just some context on the technological side:

20 Concordes were built, 1 lost, for a 5% hull loss rate.

386 DC-10 were built, 32 hull losses, for an 8.3% hull loss rate.

561 A300 were built, 25 hull losses, for a 4.4% hull loss rate.

1574 B747 were built, 65 hull losses, for a 4.1% hull loss rate.

Now, that's not normalised by "years active", and some hull losses are not attributable to the aircraft at all (e.g. terrorist attacks), but basically the Concorde safety record was on par to jets from that generation (introduced around 1970).

The Concorde numbers are so low the confidence interval is much larger than the others. It could be a freak accident there was only one catastrophic failure. And, mind you, that catastrophic failure was a pretty freakish accident itself.

Indeed, before that freak accident the Concorde had 0 hull losses. But even with it, it was not out of the ordinary, that's my point.

True. I "feel" it was well engineered and well operated, and, because of that, it had few catastrophic accidents.

But contrast that to the kind of abuse old 737's and A320s need to endure in the hands of less careful operators.

"the rare European company that is better than its American rival" this is a shitpost

I stopped reading the article after this sentence. Now I am scanning the comments.

It’d be fair to say it’s one of the few government-sponsored multinational companies that thrived. There was a time European governments pushed for strategic mergers to better compete against American companies.

The article has a weird defensive tone, as if its not about Airbus but about feeling good for USA by giving it one to Europe(but claiming superiority on everything else).

It's so strange to say that Europe doesn't have successful companies considering that EU is actually exporting much more stuff to USA and its the primary issue in recent politics and the Trump administration is trying to fix with tariffs.

Airbus is merely a rare example of intergovernmental collaboration to create a free market champion. There are not many like that, in US arguably a similar attempt to distribute defence contract between states caused the downfall of Boing once they adopted the practices through federal government orchestrated merger with McDonnell Douglas.

Maybe the author is actually trying to process the perceived US government incompetence with the libertarian idea that governments are incompetent by default in the light of existing contradiction like Airbus.

Well economic success is not measured in goods and services, but in US dollars. And since the USA prints US dollars, it automatically wins, and every other country is inferior. After all, the map is the territory.

Right, everything must about increasing the scoreboard in the bank UI.

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